Typically, promotions attempt to encourage the participant to try a product or service in the hope that the participant will continue to use the item being promoted after the promotion ends. There are many different ways to promote a product which have varying rates of success. Examples include the various ways of advertising the item; coupons redeemable at the store; rebates mailed after purchase; and contests and sweepstakes, including those in which game pieces must match a given pattern, typically a writing or graphic.
Some promotions attempt to persuade the consumer to try or use the item being promoted. The promoters generally believe that if the consumer is enticed to try or use the product they may later continue to try or use the item without being enticed by the promotion (assuming the consumer is satisfied by the item). This scenario is illustrated by coupons or advertised discounts which give temporary discounts that make the product more affordable. Unfortunately, in certain previous approaches the consumer receiving the enticement does not assure the promoted item will ever be used. If the consumer never uses the product, the benefits of the product will never be experienced which makes future uses less likely. Therefore, a need arises to structure a promotion so that the consumer must use the item being promoted in order to receive the enticement.
It is seen as advantageous to encourage use of the item being promoted without defeating the purpose of the promotion. In some cases, promotions use game pieces which are recognizable by the participants as being winners or losers before the target product is used. If the participant knows which prize is to be awarded for the game piece and the prize is seen as insubstantial, the participant may forgo the promotion and decide to not use the target product. Therefore, a need arises to keep the value of the prize (or the "winning" nature of a game piece) secret until the participant uses the product.
Promotions often try to encourage the consumer to take a new course of action different from the old way in which the consumer performed a particular task. Encouraging consumers to try new things is seen as especially difficult when the item being promoted is new and unfamiliar to consumers. For example, some banks in an effort to persuade customers to use automated teller machines and online banking, charge a fee for use of a traditional human teller. In an effort to encourage automated teller machines and online banking, the banks penalize the customers who use traditional human tellers to promote the automated methods. By imposing the penalty for using the traditional human teller, the bank may not achieve the intended result of encouraging the customer to use the automated teller machines and online banking. The customer may simply use the human teller less often or switch to another bank. In other words, the bank while attempting to encourage use of automated methods of banking (i.e., an intended result), may instead, induce an unintended result of getting the customer to use the human teller less or switch to another bank. Therefore, there is a need to structure a promotion to encourage the consumer to use the product being promoted rather than taking a less desirable or unintended course of action.
The cost of the promotion is one of the concerns sponsors of a promotion often have. If a promotion costs more than the benefits it can produce, it is generally considered uneconomical. Costs associated with at least some kinds of promotions include the infrastructure required to, e.g., (1) recognize and validate a winning game piece and (2) deliver the prize to the participant. To validate the winning game piece and distribute the prize often requires the design and manufacture of custom hardware and hiring extra employees. It would be desirable to use existing hardware without more than minor modifications and without the need for additional support personnel to validate the winning game piece and/or distribute the prize.